Qifang and PPDai are both online peer-to-peer lending systems, where you can donate small amounts to people who are often poorer and from rural areas (it is a form of microfinancing).

But where PPDai focuses on the fast and high returns, Qifang takes it a step further:

Translation of left side:

An open style scholarship platform: Need help? Want to help?

Get in now > Safe, Simple, Free.

By focusing on loans for people who can’t afford education, they’re appealing to a belief in the power education, which may just have enough altruistic sway to sidestep people’s distrust of others, and is certainly a much better story than empowering petty village commerce that does who-knows-what.

Think of donating to education as the China equivalent of people in the US donating to small entrepreneurs in the developing world (e.g. Kiva: Loans that change lives).

And as proof of their social mission, the right block on the screenshot above says:

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Jason Li is a designer, illustrator and consultant currently based in Hong Kong. Once upon a time, he studied engineering and ran a news site about fan translations of video games.

Tricia Wang observes how technology makes us human. Her ethnographic research follows youth and migrants as they process information and desire, remaking cities and rural areas.

Jin Ge aka Jingle is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and NGO organizer based in Shanghai. Jin does sociological research and produces multi-media content on the subjects of Internet subcultures and grass-root organizations in China. He is currently a senior design researcher at IDEO.

An Xiao Mina is a design strategist, new media artist and digital community builder in the Pearl River Delta. She uses technology to build and empower communities through design and artistic expression.

Graham Webster is a Beijing-based writer and analyst working at the intersection of politics, history, and information technology in China and East Asia. He believes technology and information design can reveal some of what what wonkdom can’t.

Christina Xu is an observer and organizer of communities, both online and off-. She is particularly interested in youth subcultures, cultural translation & syncretism, and user reappropriations of technology.

Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto, California. She studies new experiences enabled by connective technologies.